Accessing Data from the ISC

A Surguy and R J Willemann

S12C-04

The ISC has distributed its data in print, as the Bulletin and
Catalogue, since its inception. We have provided data in digital
format on custom-written tapes and other media since early in the
Centre's history and we continue to provide outcomes from specialised
searches of our data. During this period, the Centre established a
policy of distribution at a price just sufficient to cover the cost of
reproduction. Starting in 1995, we released a series of CDs that now
provide our complete data set in computer-readable form, at lower cost
than custom products. Since 1997, we have made all of our analysed
data freely available on the Internet from our web site.

In the future we plan to continue improving the accessibility of our
data and the ease of integrating it with other data. New query tools
on our web site will provide greater flexibility in selecting data.
We have implemented mechanisms to generate focused links to other
Internet nodes and insert them in our on-line Bulletin. The objective
is not to merely tell users of other data sources, but to link them
directly to a moment tensor, waveform collection or velocity model
needed for further analysis of the event they have found in the
Bulletin. We are working with other seismic data centres to help
define more widely useful standards for data exchange and
CORBA-compliant object classes. We are evaluating the possibility of
distributing functions written in Fortran, C and other languages to
allow users to more easily access our data from within their own
programs.